An Exchange of Eagles/Beauty Sleep/Police Chief [antikvár]

PrologueSUNDAY AUGUST 27,1939. ZOSSENAll that week the leaders of the West had been concerned with preserving peace. The Pope had taken to the radio and beseeched the strong, by the blood of Christ, to hear him and not turn their power into a destruction. Leopold III, King of the Belgians, had called upon the men responsible for the course of events to submit their disputes to open negotiation. Franklin Roosevelt had sent urgent messages to Adolf Hitler and President Moscicki of Poland urging them to settle their differences without recourse to arms. Premier Daladier had sent Hitler a moving and eloquent letter and his Britannic Majesty's Ambassador to Germany, Sir Nevile Henderson seemed to be in a state of perpetual motion between Whitehall and the Wilhelmstrasse.Standing on the hot and dustry barracks square at Zossen Army Headquarters for the Polish Campaign, Paul van Osten knew these well inten-tioned efforts were doomed to failure. All the previous day the air over Berlin had been filled with the drone of German bombers flying to the east. An SD unit was preparing to stage a fake attack on a German radio station on the Polish Border, thereby giving Hitler the pretext he needed for the invasion of Poland. That sultry August Sunday, standing in the barracks square at Zossen, with the sweat dampening the high collar of his tunic, Paul van Osten knew that world peace now depended on a phial of acid slowly eating through a strand of copper wire."But I am wrongly judged if my love of peace and my patience are mistaken for weakness or even cowardice."The words reverberated across the square, even the echo effect of the loud speakers unable to still the inspiration of that golden voice. The Führer had come to Zossen to address these the last of his troops to be moved to the east. Along one side of the square grocery trucks and fumiture vans were drawn up in a ragged line. Because the attack on Poland had originally been planned for the previous Friday, all available army vehicles were already in use on the Pohsh frontier."I speak to Poland in the same language that Poland has for months past used towards us."Paul van Osten had been fourteen when the Great War had ended. He still remembered the bitterness of his father, a Colonel in the 14th Cavalry, at the politician's betrayal of the army. Years later, while a military cadet at Lichterfelde, van Osten had experienced the consequences of that betrayal. The huge burden of reparations had brought about crippling inflation. Workers took their pay home in wheelbarrows.